Infidel753

31 January 2012

Must-read #1: empowered bullies

Sorry for the light posting -- this whole month, especially the last couple of weeks, has kept me exhaustingly busy. Since I haven't written much, here's a must-read item from Noahpinion which captures very well what I've long thought is the essential problem of libertarianism -- its cultists rhapsodize endlessly about "liberty" (a word they prefer to the more plain and concrete-sounding "freedom"), but the practical result of implementing libertarian schemes in the real world wouldn't be an increase in freedom or liberty as we generally understand those words; it would be a society of empowered bullies.

28 January 2012

Two maps of Germany

For much of late 2011 the top news story in Germany was not the euro crisis, but the discovery of a small neo-Nazi terrorist cell which had murdered at least ten people over a period of several years. The case, along with the Breivik massacre in Norway, has focused attention on the threat of violent right-wing extremists in Europe.

In this context I found the following two maps illuminating. The first shows the distribution of votes for the NPD, Germany's most far-right political party, which is a good proxy for the distribution of extremist right-wing views in the population:

Notice how there are just six of Germany's sixteen states where the NPD gets over 2% support: the five states which formerly made up East Germany, plus Berlin (half of which was also part of East Germany). Although the far right in Europe largely defines itself by hostility to non-Western immigrants, these states are not, as you might think, the ones with the most immigrants; except for Berlin, they have the fewest, since most of the immigrants came before Germany was re-unified, and in any case immigrants head for the most prosperous areas because that's where the jobs are. Most Germans (and most Europeans) are unhappy at the presence of large immigrant populations, often for good reason -- but that doesn't lead most of them to extreme-right views.

So if it isn't the presence of immigrants that inflames extremism, what does?

Here's a map showing the distribution of recipients of government anti-poverty benefits -- that is, the darkest areas have the highest concentrations of poverty:

Aside from urban pockets in Bremen and the Ruhr, the same six eastern states stand out. It seems that poverty and joblessness (unemployment remains higher in the former East Germany than the rest of the country), and the anxiety and despair they bring, create an opening for extremists.

"Poverty" is of course a relative term. Germany is probably the most socialist of the major countries of the Western world; its economy is strong, inequality is far less extreme than in the US, and poverty is never so abject as what we routinely see in certain parts of the US.

Yet that just makes the implications all the clearer. If poverty and unemployment in a place like Germany fuel extremism, should we be surprised at what we see in some of the poorest parts of our own country, where low-quality education is also a factor? Our former Confederate states, like the former East German states above, suffer from lingering backwardness.

There are elements in our political class whose hopes for winning elections rest largely on the persistence of fringe-right and racist attitudes in much of our population. And those same political elements seem determined to obstruct any policies that would stimulate the economy or reduce inequality, and are constantly trying to sabotage education with crackpottery like creationism and abstinence-only indoctrination. Maybe they know what they're doing.

20 January 2012

The Republican horror show

So the original eight Republican candidates have been winnowed by half. Nein-nein-nein, the wicked witch, the sane guy, and the moron have quit. The remaining choices are a plastic financial vampire, a megalomaniac Elmer Gantry pit bullfrog with a short fuse, Christine O'Donnell in drag, and that doddering old Jim Crow relic who insists on coming down from the attic every four years to embarrass the rest of the family. Aren't you glad you're not a Republican primary voter?

Don't feel too sorry for those who are, though. Remember how they booed an American soldier, cheered for letting the uninsured die, and gave a standing ovation when the bullfrog put the only black guy in the room in his place for daring to bring up racism. We're not exactly talking the cream of the gene pool here. We've all known people like this -- the kind that lick their fingertips, leave the sound on during TV commercials, and think it's OK to be fat. Now they've stuck tea-bags on their hats and become a political movement. They probably couldn't spell "illiterate" (or even the N-word, apparently), but think they understand the Constitution better than the Supreme Court does. When the bullfrog vented outrage that his ex-wife would do to him what he did to Bill Clinton, these Morlocks drooled with adoration; in fact, they're poised to yank South Carolina out from under the vampire and present it to him as a token of their esteem. And the vampire's looking scared that his tax returns will prove to be the ray of sunlight that crumbles him to dust -- which may well be the case.

The Democrats have been granted the prayer of Voltaire. I'm starting to think this year just might bring us a landslide.

19 January 2012

Video of the week -- through science to the truth

16 January 2012

2011 in review -- year of the masses

2011 was an amazing year. The intense interconnectedness which modern technology has brought to humanity world-wide made itself felt as never before, in a wave of mass protests that drew inspiration from each other despite vast geographical separation and cultural differences. It started in Tunisia, spread rapidly to Egypt and then the rest of the Arab world, then to Europe and our own country, and finally to Russia. Even in China, the tyrants are beginning to tremble.

The circumstances and issues in all these places were different, but the common thread remained. Cynicism, passivity, and defeatism faded before a new realization that ordinary people, organized and energized and determined, can challenge entrenched powers and institutions that seemed as solid and immovable as the Pyramids.

The Occupier movement in the US was a true mass protest. It was not organized or articulate, and it was never clear who, if anyone, spoke for it. But it drew together people of many different kinds who had grasped the central problem confronting our country today -- the explosive growth of inequality to obscene levels, and the destructive stranglehold of the financial parasite class on the economy. For most Americans, real incomes and security and prospects for upward mobility have stagnated and even declined, and we must fight back. The Occupiers may be short on solutions -- may even have created a distraction from real solutions -- but they have, at least, correctly identified the problem.

Originating in Canada but rapidly spreading through the US was another new protest movement, the SlutWalks, triggered by a single clueless police officer's remark that "women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized". This came to symbolize an omnipresent problem which is hard to define but which we all know when we see it -- the puritanical victim-blaming "slut-shaming" mentality which still taints and deforms sexuality even in our supposedly liberated times. All over North America, women marched to demonstrate that they could and would dress however they damn well pleased and that no one had any right to take it as an invitation, or excuse, for assault.

(Fellow males, do remember that we too have an interest here. Beyond the obvious fact that dressing revealingly does not make women legitimate targets of violence, if society keeps sending the message that it does, then they'll stop dressing revealingly -- and what a drag that would be.)

All these movements were denounced by the powers-that-be in the terms usual for reactionaries in the respective countries. From Cairo to Moscow, authoritarians blathered about foreign agitators (Qaddhafi's regime got so confused as to blame the Libyan revolt on both the US and al-Qâ'idah, unlikely co-conspirators). EU elites grumbled darkly about populism and nationalism. American right-wingers seemed to deal with the Occupiers by slipping into "damn those dirty hippies" mode, apparently forgetting which side from back in the sixties ended up being vindicated by history.

Victory is not yet complete, anywhere. In some Arab lands the old regimes still cling grimly to power with increasingly-bloody claws, while in others there is an ongoing struggle to protect hard-won revolutionary gains against theocratic or military reactionaries. The EU has ignored the mass anti-austerity protests in its member nations, though its grip on them is looking ever more shaky. In our country, the Occupier movement seems to be bifurcating -- an increasingly anarchist faction is descending into bullying of the working class like this and this and will eventually fade away, while the elements that want to achieve real change are joining forces with unions and learning how to work within the political system. And it's too early to tell how Russia and China will turn out.

But it's very hard to imagine the old passivity returning. There will be retreats and defeats, even serious ones, but in the long run the people will win.

2011 also saw the deaths of three of the world's worst people -- Osama bin Laden, Muammar Qaddhafi, and Kim Jong Il -- as well as of one of its best. And a personification of evil we'd thought long buried -- Jim Crow -- rose up from the dead, in the form of blatant vote-suppression laws in state after state.

14 January 2012

Tribute to a life-form long vanished (thank goodness)

Since mid-2009 this blog has been endowed with a stats counter which I can see whenever I log in, which gives me some basic information about numbers of page views, which countries they're coming from, and how they got here. The latter feature shows me the URLs of sites from which people went to mine by clicking on a link there. Many of these are other blogs, but a lot of people also come to my blog via search engines like Google.

In the case of those search engines, I can also see the search term that was inputted which brought up my blog as one of the search results. For example, if someone typed "Muhammad cartoon" or "Chinese view of Hiroshima" into Google and ended up on my blog as a result, I can see those search terms listed.

Well, ever since April last year, there has been one search term which, week by week and month by month, has consistently appeared more often than any other -- one word that, more than any other, has led search engines to bring people to this blog.

What is that search term? It's "eurypterids".

What, you may be wondering, is a eurypterid? Here's one:

I posted this picture back in March, here, having run across it on the internet and wondered what it was. Don't worry, the picture is fake -- it has to be, because it really is a eurypterid, and the last of them died more than 250 million years ago. But they were real.

These monstrosities belonged to the arthropod phylum (animals with jointed exoskeletons including insects, spiders, centipedes, lobsters, things like that); they were ocean-dwellers. There were 246 species of eurypterids that we know of, and probably many more that we don't know of, fossilization being the haphazard process it is. As far as we know, they were the largest arthropods that have ever existed -- the biggest species were even larger than the one in the picture above.

Despite their appearance, the eurypterids were apparently more closely related to scorpions than to lobsters, and are sometimes called "sea scorpions". They did not have stings like their smaller modern relatives, but would still have been terrifying things to encounter -- just imagine finding a "bug" like the one pictured above scuttling about your kitchen. Not exactly the sort of thing you could just step on. And, yes, some species were amphibious, able to walk on land and perhaps even living on land for part of their life cycle.

But don't worry, you will never meet one. The last of them died before the dinosaurs were even a gleam in evolution's eye. Today, we know of them only from their fossil remains.

So why are eurypterids such a much-searched item on the net? Maybe their appeal is somewhat like that of dinosaurs -- extinct animals far bigger than animals of their type, in human eyes, have any right to be. Given their bizarre and unearthly form, they may also fascinate in the same way as the monster of the Alien movies does. If a modern human were to find himself on the Earth of the Ordovician period, when eurypterids flourished, and beheld them scuttling about and perhaps sizing him up as a potential meal, he might well imagine himself to be on some ghastly alien planet.

Whatever the critters' appeal, it's not limited to English-speaking countries. By now I've actually picked up the Russian word for "eurypterid" (ракоскорпион, ra-ka-skar-pee-OWN), since it crops up regularly in the list of search terms on my stats counter.

Needless to say, this is not a word ever likely to be of much use to me for striking up conversations on the streets of Moscow ("My hovercraft is full of eurypterids"?), but at least I know something not many people in the United States know.

For whatever reason, these long-dead monsters have done much to draw attention to this blog. It seems only right that I return the favor.

13 January 2012

The Bain of his candidacy

Gingrich's scorched-earth campaign against Romney, using Bain Capital as its chief weapon of mass destruction, has implications beyond just Romney's candidacy or the 2012 election. Romney and much of the Republican establishment have denounced this line of attack as an expression of "envy" and as anti-capitalist, but as William Galston observes:

Most citizens make an intuitive distinction between business activities that add value to workers and the economy (running an auto company, for example, as Romney’s father did) and those that shuffle paper to the advantage only of the shufflers.

Or, to use my own terms, the distinction between productive capitalism and the financial parasite class. Even teabaggers harbor an inchoate suspicion of the latter, however much they've been manipulated to serve its interests in practice. What Gingrich has done is to drag this issue into the open and make it explicit. None of this critique is new to us. But it's now coming from a source to which non-liberals are more inclined to give a hearing.

The attack couldcost Romney the nomination. More and more Republican establishment figures are sternly warning Gingrich that his line of attack on Romney is unacceptable and must stop. Predictably, this has been followed by a shift of rank-and-file South Carolina Republican voters away from Romney, who now shows as almost tied with Gingrich there. The attacks do resonate with many of them, who are likely to be suspicious of what looks like a clumsy effort to silence the messenger.

Still, Romney will probably be the nominee, if only because those who reject him still can't unite behind a single candidate. But he'll be all the more vulnerable to the Democrats' natural line of attack. Anyone who wants to fend it off by screaming "socialist" will need to explain how Gingrich is a socialist.

Beyond that, the whole issue of the financial parasite class is now being made an explicit election issue in a way it never has been before. If it brings Romney down, then the core raison d'être of the traditional non-theocratic Republican establishment -- the continued subjugation of America to that class, disguised by free-market rhetoric and whatever other squid-ink works best at any given time -- will become much tougher to pursue.

Gingrich is no working-class hero for doing this. His motive seems to be rage at Romney for defeating him in Iowa. The Republicans have embraced the politics of resentment and vindictiveness and exclusion, and now they are destroying each other.

12 January 2012

Quote for the day -- the best of a bad lot

"Mitt Romney is such an ass. He would sell his mother to win the election. He has flipped positions so many times, he would get a 10 on the uneven bars. He makes shit up – like the number of jobs Bain Capital (a venture capital firm – which is designed to make money by getting rid of jobs) has created. He calls Obama a socialist, refuses to release his tax return, ties his dog to the car, denies involvement with Romneycare, thinks only the rich should run for office, thinks corporations are people, claims he is unem- ployed, and touts he is the everyman. But as awful as Mitt is – his rivals for the GOP nomination are even worse."

08 January 2012

Quote for the day -- the totalitarian mind

"One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country.....Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that’s okay, contraception is okay. It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be."

04 January 2012

Video of the week -- lord of evil

A Santorum surge from the rear

The final tally from Iowa was Romney 30,015, Santorum 30,007. The champion of the Sane faction of Republicans won by just eight votes over the most theocratic and anti-gay candidate in the field, a man with an underfunded campaign, who lost his last Senate race by 18 points, and who's barely registered in the polls until now.

Ron Paul got 26,219 votes. Add that plus the votes for Perry and Bachmann to Santorum's figure (plus the 58 votes for Cain -- some people really aren't following the news), and the total for the Nutty faction is 74,961, almost two and a half times Romney's number.

Santorum is just the latest not-Romney to surge forth as flavor-of- the-month for the Nutties, of course. Like his predecessors he will likely sink in the polls as he becomes better known (I suspect many fundies don't yet realize that he's Catholic, a religion the Chick-tract wing of fundamentalism considers practically a form of Satanism). But there is clearly a vast chorus of Republicans out there pleading, please, please, anybody but the Sane guy. What's next? A Palin write-in campaign? A draft-O'Donnell movement? I hear David Duke is free. The Republican party has a huge problem here, even if somewhat masked by the fact that the Nutty vote is still divided among several candidates.

01 January 2012

Happy new year!

About Me

Individualist, transhumanist, American patriot, socialist, atheist, liberal, optimist, pragmatist, and regular guy -- it has been my great good fortune to live my whole life free of "spirituality" of any kind. I believe that evidence and reason are the keys to understanding reality; that it is technology rather than ideology or politics that has been the great liberator of humanity; and that in the long run human intelligence is the most powerful force in the universe.